This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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Yesterday I did something that made me shiver. For the first time since 1993, I *intentionally* deleted email. Yes, I did. I have actually been preparing for this moment for several months, but the events of the last few days prompted this action.
Up until June of this year, my email client would filter the spam into a spam folder and out of my main mailbox so I wouldn’t have to slog through them when dealing with my real email. Then once every few weeks I’d look through the spam folder for things that got in there by mistake, move them back into my inbox, and then file all the spam into my perminant archive in the correct folders. (I organize all my old email by the sent date by month, and because spam often has goofy dates, I have mail folders going back to 1901 or so, and going forward to the 2050’s sometime.) So it would all get filed. None would be lost.
As of July 1st at 00:00 UTC I have been taking the spam from the spam folder and actually putting it in the trash rather than filing it into my month by month folders. I had however turned off the automatic emptying of the trash, so it wouldn’t really be gone and I could change my mind if I wanted to. I was holding off on actually pulling the trigger on emptying the trash.
Well, in the aftermath of the whole saga outlined in the previous few blog postings, I was slowly copying over the 20,000 spams that had been miraculously saved out of my remote cache and into my pure local folders, so that when I reconnected to the mail servers again they wouldn’t be wiped out like the real mail had been.
About two hours into that effort… it took awhile because interspersed with the ones where I had full caches were some where I did not, and they would give errors when I tried to copy them and I had to work around that… anyway…
About two hours into it, I suddenly said “What the hell am I doing???” I was spending lots of time and effort saving spam messages I didn’t give a damn about. So after doing one last check for real mail in there by mistake (I found about 20 real messages out of the 20,000 in the spam folder) I just went ahead and trashed them all.
And then turned back on the setting for trash over one month old to be automatically purged perminantly. A lot of the trash went away instantly. Boom.
I have deleted email. On purpose.
I have deleted spam.
This is a major milestone for Sam.
I feel a little queasy, and if I think about it hard I regret it a little bit.
But it is done. There is no going back.
Kinda sad really.
Still debating if I retroactively go back and delete all the spam from before July. Probably not.
So for those of you advocating for me not perminantly archiving all the spam I get… you have won the battle!
One last word about the data loss thing from last night. (Well, at least until I put out the September and October email results.)
Losing 2000 emails of current vintage that I hadn’t yet “dealt with” including personal stuff, some business stuff (house stuff and the like) and a lot of messages I use for task management and the like threw me into a major psychological tailspin from which I am just starting to recover. But there is an important thing to remember. When it comes to obsessive compulsive things like saving every email I have sent or recieved since 1993 (including spam) I am just a tad… I say a tad… neurotic. And I know this. I know that the level to which I get upset is a bit beyond where it should be on a rational basis. I am working on that. I am getting better at these things. I am trying to keep a positive attitude and move forward without forever dwelling on the couple minutes where I could have prevented it. Having said that though, I know I still overreact.
And, as part of that, I want to publicly apologize to Chris.
Although I was actually trying to be “good” when talking (OK, IMing) with him about the difficulties last night, it has been pointed out to me that I did not actually succeed and ended up being very insensitive. Given my mental state at the time, I guess that is no surprise. I was so wrapped up in my own little neurotic disaster to properly acknoledge the great lengths Chris had gone to, with many many hours without sleep, to try to salvage the situation. And to the fact that while I lost a bunch of stuff, with perhaps a few exceptions, if I wasn’t quite as psycho about my mail, very little of it was truly “important” to anybody but me. (Although it WAS very important to me.) Meanwhile, both Rebecca and Chris lost lots of data as well. And much of Chris’s was work related. And, as with mine, there most often was not a way to recover it.
I’m sorry Chris. I *do* realize the amount of work you did, having done that kind of emergency repair work a few times on my own when drives have failed. I realize how stressful it is, and how heartbreaking it is to even be in that situation, and to know there is a lot you will not be able to get back. And I recognize that you have both lost a lot of value as well.
Last night when we IMed I was too wrapped up in my own loss to be sensitive to the work you had done, or your own loss. Most of my anger and frustration was actually directed at myself for having let my own routine backup strategy lapse. Once upon a time I had automatic daily backups of everything that mattered. I let that slip away. I also up until the very last second if I had been thinking could have just made a local backup “just in case”. I did not. And that is my fault, not yours. And regardless of that, I should have been commiserating in our mutual loss and thanking you for your hard work, rather than just being snippy.
I humbly apologize.
Well, as devastated as I am by the loss of about 2000 emails I hadn’t yet responded to (and a few I hadn’t even read), I have this fact to brighten my day:
While my main inbox was essentially wiped, I *have* been able to salvage and restore approximately 20,000 saved spam emails that had been automatically routed to a different folder that did not have time to syncronize before I shut my mail program down to stop the syncing.
TWENTY THOUSAND EMAILS (well, OK, spam) SAVED!!!
Woo!
More seriously, I can look at this and say that this is probably one of the worst things that have happened to me in at least five years, if not more. And then I can look at this and say *THIS* is one of the worst things that have happened to me in about five years. Wow. I am very lucky and very fortunate. In the grand scheme of things, as much as this kind of thing upsets me, this little incident is almost irrelevant.
Emails that I save compulsively were lost, but hey, most people just delete theirs anyway. We went through hurricanes but still have a place to live and didn’t lose much. I got laid off but within months (and before the money ran out) had a new and better job. I had to move almost 1000 miles, further away from family and friends than ever before, but I found Brandy and Amy and they wanted to go with me, and I am not alone.
No, I have it pretty damn good.
And last night, when I was having my obsessive compulsive fit and was freaking out and breaking down and showing my depression, Brandy pulled out what was supposed to be a Christmas present, and to cheer me up gave it to me early. A white labcoat with “Abulsme Noibatno Itramne” embroidered onto it in the area where the name goes. A prefect mad-scientist labcoat! Through everything else that was going on, it made me smile.
Can it get any better than that?
Hello everybody! If you’ve sent me email recently and haven’t gotten a response… I’m sorry, see below!
Due to a server meltdown, I lost all email sent to me from about September 15th to the present… and because I was way behind on email due to having a slow internet connection at the moment, plus having had several hurricanes to worry about, plus being busy with the family and new job, I was way behind on answering or sometimes even reading those emails… anyway, about 2000 emails were wiped out without a trace… (I had a local copy of all of them on my own computer, but as soon as it tried to syncronize with the melted down server, all the emails were lost, something I had not anticipated, and so hadn’t made provisions for.)
So if you sent me any emails in that time and have not yet gotten a response, my apologies. It is my fault for taking so long to respond to begin with, but now I don’t even have the email to respond to, and don’t know for sure who all emailed me at the time…
Anyway, point is, if you sent me any emails during that time period and still have a copy of them in your sent mail folders or anything like that, please forward them back to me and I will respond as quickly as I can, and I apologize greatly for not having responded earlier….
(I’d also like to reconstitute as much as my mail archive as possible, so if you have copies of other emails from other people that I was cc’d on please send me those too, so I can answer them as well! Or emails you sent and don’t actually want answers to as well. And while I would love NEW emails too, if you do have a copy of whatever you sent before, that would be MUCH APPRECIATED.)
Thanks everybody. I’ll be very grateful for any emails you are able to forward back to me! (For those familiar with my monthly email contests, emails forwarded back to me from the time period mentioned WILL be counted toward that…)
And for that matter, just to talk to some of you again! It has been awhile for some of you!
(Oh yeah, the abulsme@abulsme.com address will be back soon, but for the moment, please use this abulsme@mac.com address. Thanks.)
Talk to you all soon!
The tests on our phone line are done. We passed. Which hopefully means we will have DSL “soon” and will be able to stop using this frustratingly slow dialup.
In any case, abulsme.com is back up. Normal posting will resume shortly.
Some tests need to be run on the phone line that abulsme.com is currently using for its slow 56K connection to the internet. This is in preparation for activating DSL on the line. For this, the line must not be busy. So sometime in the next hour, I’ll be shutting down abulsme.com again. Don’t know exactly when they will do the tests. But I’ll basically stay dark until they are done, unless I get an email saying they won’t do the tests until some date X in the future, in which case I may turn it back on again until a little before then. But for now, I’ll be shutting down again. Hope to be back soon… although still on dialup.
But then hopefully, within a week or two… if all goes well… the site will be back on something better than a modem powered by hamsters.
So, unless we get hit by another one, here is the roundup of hurricane damage to the house we are renting. Brandy put this list together yesterday:
Charlie:
- Power out for 15 hours, no other damage
Francis:
- Big palm tree out front fell into the driveway.
- Bush by Colony Dr. property line knocked over.
Jeanne:
- Tree is far left corner of yard snapped in many places.
- Tree by back door of Florida Room suspected to be an issue in the future, removed.
- Many shingles missing from roof.
- Some tar paper missing on edges.
- Roofing materials on edges lifting from roof in wind.
- Aluminum roof edging damaged and missing in many areas.
- Much siding on underside of roof over porch missing.
- Front gutter completely gone, other areas damaged.
- Leak in Florida room warping panels on ceiling (about 3×3 ft area on back edge)
- Leak in hallway area through second and third bedroom door jams, back room air vent, around edges of attic access and through fixture for fire alarm.
- Leak through front storm door.
- Possible carpet damage due to leaks
- Power out for 6 days
As for the leaks: It has been suggested that they may have been caused by almost horizontally falling rain through the vent in the roof, though there has not been another significant rain with which to test this theory. The leak through the storm door was certainly caused by the angle of the rain.
The carpets are a concern due to the possibility of mold. They smelled badly, and took a long time to dry because there was no power to run a dehumidifier. The rooms affected were the center hall, living room, and second and third bedrooms. The one bedroom room just has carpet laid over glued tile. It was damaged before when the AC system drain was clogged right before Frances. A secondary concern would be the integrity of the glue on the tiles (they
tend to lift when having been wet).
We’re working with the owners (Ivan’s family) to determine how all that will be dealt with.
Meanwhile, the house we are trying to buy was damaged more extensively. It needs a whole new roof, a new pool enclosure, and some interior ceilings need replacing as well. We don’t know all the details since it is still not ours. The current plan is for the owners to fix it, then we will proceed. The question becomes can they do it in time before our interest rate lock expires and such. Last update we had is they still expect to be able to complete repairs by mid-November, which would let us close in December as planned. (Well, originally we were thinking October, but according to the revised plan.)
Anyway, we’ll just have to see how that plays out.
As many people have told me “Welcome to Florida!”
Power went out Sunday at 05:26 UTC. Unfortunately I unplugged the server and everything when water started leaking in the office where I had it, and although I kept meaning to I never plugged it back in, so the server did not turn itself back on (cause it wasn’t plugged in) when the power came back on. So I don’t know the exact time the power came back on. Based on some non-exact clues, I estimate between 19:00 and 20:00 UTC today. I was stilla t work and didn’t mange to get home and plug everything in until 22:15 UTC. So, we were without power for approximately 5 days and 14 hours. (Sorry for the approximation, my fault.) Abulsme.com was down for 5 days, 16 hours and 49 minutes.
Please blame Jeanne. We are now back in normal service. For now.
Well, normal for running off a 56k Modem that isn’t there 24/7 anyway. :-)
Brandy and Amy are both asleep on the couch next to where I am set up. We lost power for a few times, but just for a few seconds each. We’re back up for the moment, but who knows for how long. The weather people on TV are reporting from Melbourne and it looks pretty bad. Horizontal wind and all that. From in here, I can’t see out at all since everything is plywooded. It is very frustrating. I want to go look outside, but am refraining. The noise comes and goes. But for the most part, it is there all the time. But just like a normal storm almost. And then it whistles really loud for a minute or two…
It is in the process of making landfall right now. We’ll have a few more hours of this… oooo… nother power flicker. Lets get this thing out…
We’re all inside now. There is just a constant rumble from outside. And flapping from the plastic we put on the windows before we had the plywood to put up. I can feel the pressure changes. It feels like rapidly going up on a plane or a high rise elevator. Haven’t looked outside in about an hour. Back then it was dark. The neighbor was walking a little yippy dog that looked like it should just blow away in the wind, but it was still on the ground. The streetlights were still on so we could see. The trees were wipping all around.
We’re still on the outer edges. Melbourne radar here. That is a live URL, so it isn’t just the radar when I am posting, it is the radar whenever you look. As I write, you can clearly see the eye of the storm on the radar, just southeast of Fort Pierce. Melbourne is on the very outer edges of the rain bands, in light blue. Nothing heavy yet. But there are some yellow and orange bands coming. How bad we get will end up on just when it turns I guess. The worst areas should be a little south of us, but sounds like we’re still in for a bunch worse before it gets better.
Right now it isn’t that bad. Just very windy. And the pressure. It is giving me a big headache and my ears hurt. And I’m a little tired. Brandy is taking a nap. I might sometime soon too.
Or not.
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